The glass windows were what sold them. Standing inside a stripped-back former Ulster Bank on Cork’s Winthrop Street, Jack and Theo Kirwan, the brothers behind Sprout & Co, watched the light pour across the floor and understood the room would carry their first restaurant beyond Leinster. Ten years almost to the week after they opened a small salad bar on Dublin’s Dawson Street, they are starting again from nothing in the city that arguably made them, the place where, at Ballymaloe Cookery School, a single just-picked tomato set the whole enterprise in motion. The question hanging over the November opening is not whether Cork will be curious. It is whether the particular kind of devotion Sprout inspires can travel at all.
For a decade the company’s origin story has hardened into Irish food lore: two brothers, a Ballymaloe-stoked obsession with seasonality, a juice round that popped up inside Avoca before the first bricks-and-mortar salad bar arrived in 2015. What followed reads like a tidy fable of millennial ambition. The farm in Kildare. The punny salads. The cookbook. The recipe videos. The lunchtime queue, and then the app built to skip the lunchtime queue. Yet where the usual mogul story is one of extraction, from labour, from land, from luck, the Kirwans have quietly inverted the model and built by retention instead. They still take shifts on the floor. They keep staff for years. They keep the goodwill of suppliers and customers alike, though they would ask you, gently, to stop petitioning for a northside Dublin branch in the comments. They know. They are working on it.
If the affection runs deep, so do the roots. “It’s definitely in our veins,” Theo says, and he means it almost literally. Their grandmother, Gogo Kirwan, was the woman behind the storied Beaufield Mews. Their cousin Simon Pratt helped stitch Avoca into Irish life. Their late uncle, Liam O’Dwyer, more or less drew the blueprint for Dublin nightlife with Café en Seine, The George and Zanzibar. Their mother, Siobhan, simply put a salad on the table every day. That lineage shows up not only in how the brothers build but in how they argue. “You’re so open with each other because you’re family, so you can have brilliant, passionate arguments,” Theo says. The cadence between them is quick and overlapping, affectionate and competitive, never once combative. “In the kitchen, we both challenge each other,” Jack adds.
“Ultimately we both want the best thing for Sprout”
They extend that friction to their staff on purpose. “You don’t want yes-men,” Theo says. “You want to be surrounded by people who are passionate and able to have arguments with you if they believe in something.” It is also, more quietly, an engine of loyalty. Through an internal programme called Rising Star, the brothers move people up rather than out: Kevin Santana arrived as a kitchen porter with no English and now shapes the food alongside Theo. The ambition Jack names is startlingly concrete for hospitality, a sector synonymous with burnout. “We want to have it so that a restaurant manager can buy a house in this city.” Cork is proof of the philosophy in motion. Five Dublin staff are relocating for the launch, among them Nathalia Dorigan, a Sprout veteran the brothers call Nat, who opened Camden Street and Monkstown with them and will now manage the Cork room.
That instinct for reciprocity has spilled beyond the payroll. When Sprout had spare frontage on Dawson Street, they handed it to Fable Bakery founders Elyse Clarke and Kate O’Sullivan, who launched there as a concession for less than five thousand euro, rent-free at the start and again at the end. “They launched their business at the front of our restaurant,” Theo says, still delighted by it. Last October, Fable opened its own premises in Dún Laoghaire. “Who wouldn’t want to be part of that?”
None of it makes Cork a foregone conclusion, and the brothers refuse to treat it as one. They spent roughly two years finding the right room, then chose a former Ulster Bank left vacant since 2023, smaller and brighter than the phrase “old bank” suggests. Where most restaurants run one friends-and-family night, Sprout is running ten unpaid mock services before the doors open on Monday, 17 November. “Every place is different,” Jack insists. “We’re going in assuming nothing other than we gotta give it everything.” Theo puts it more plainly: “First impressions are everything.”
The same obsessiveness governs the food. What once came together in five frantic days of throwing ideas at an apartment wall now takes months. “We work on new offerings for months and debate every grain of salt,” Theo says, and the menu is policed by their cousin Tom Kelly’s maxim, “If it’s not broken, break it.” When the beloved Supergreek recently displaced a cult favourite, the inbox revolted. Classics endure anyway, the Kale Caesar and the Sataysfied Chicken bowl among them, though the brothers refuse to name a favourite. Theo, a former actor whose recipe videos have gathered a following of 170,000, has turned that fluency into a cookbook, Saladology, blessed by Ballymaloe’s own Darina Allen, and into a farm that now delivers leaves to the pass within a day of cutting. He watches the internet give his carefully plated bowls the full Kardashian salad-shake until they become, in his word, monstrosities, and laughs. “As long as they’re enjoying it, who am I to tell them how to eat?” What Cork is really testing is whether that patient, affectionate, almost domestic way of building a business still holds when the city, for once, owes them nothing.
